As we search for new roles for higher education amidst the social, economic
and political changes and challenges wrought by contemporary globalization, it is useful to reflect on the historic functions performed by universities. Essentially these have been knowledge creation, knowledge transmission, and knowledge conservation. Within these essential functionalities have appeared in different societies and cultures at different times the full reach of other important social activities such as the production and reproduction of elites and professional classes, the expansion of higher education to other social strata through its democratization and massification, the creation, distillation and dissemination of scientific knowledge, the codification and conservation of linguistic and cultural practices, etc. Evident in this historical sweep has been the ability of higher education institutions to change, albeit slowly and conservatively, in the face of wide-reaching social change: to create opportunities for new kinds of inquiry, to fashion disciplines appropriate for their detailed study and transmission, and to champion, albeit unevenly, social values of open inquiry and opportunity.
The challenge that rapid globalization presents to universities is whether they can continue to adapt, no longer slowly or organically, but in the quantum leaps that are required by new realities. Knowledge is not what it used to be; or more accurately, the manner by which knowledge is created, transmitted and conserved now happens through modalities, institutions, and configurations unknown before, and at speeds once unimaginable. Universities no longer enjoy a priority role, and certainly not an exclusivity role in an environment of internet access, media overload, corporate and lifestyle customized offerings, and so on. They continue to play a vital role, but it must be recognized that this role must be reshaped in the context where there are competing knowledge providers, which they must recognize, network, partner with, and mutually strengthen.
For example, there have always been linkages between universities and the other sectors of society which it serves and for which it provides the human resource base. But with the pressures brought about by globalization, and an accelerated pace of development, these linkages take on a new urgency and primacy. The world of work has changed around the globe, and universities must prepare their graduates for careers and jobs for which academic programs do not as yet exist; for this, more intense collaboration is vital. Globalization has promoted progress, in the context of rapid and flexible competitiveness, but in largely uneven and inequitable terms. Especially in developing countries, universities are looked upon as having the potential to correct the widening equity divide by preventing the human resource base of these countries from being left too far behind their counterparts in other countries. And universities can respond to this call only if they are closely allied to the country's productive and economic sectors. As we contemplate the contributions universities will make in the future in this revised context, we see academic programs where students alternate years on campus with years working in industry, government, or the social sector. We see academic research councils which have members from industry and other sectors as full members, jointly formulating research agendas and programs of study. We see adjunct faculty posts provided to persons outside the academy who can contribute to the development of a flexible, updated human resource base needed in a globalized, rapid, competitive world. And with a slightly different twist, and one of unpredictable consequence, we see a startling increase in the privatization of intellectual property as faculty seek to own and commercialize their intellectual contributions to the overall knowledge process.
The globalization pressures on developing countries reproduce some of these dynamics, but create whole new sets of problems as well. Whereas their universities no longer have the luxury of developing at their own pace, at the risk of being left behind in the global race, they do not have anywhere near the needed financial capabilities of their more well-endowed counterparts in the advanced countries. Yet if their countries are not to be left behind, they have no choice but to strive to provide internationally comparable and competitive programs. This tension has brought the private sector into higher education in ways that differ remarkably from the tradition of private higher education in the developed countries, especially the United States where a tradition of higher education for the public good has resulted in a historic convergence of purpose between private and public institutions. This is less clear in the developing world, especially in the very rapidly growing economies of China and India, where the temptations to skim the market for well paying students leads all too often to an inferior and highly specialized education that pays little attention either to issues of providing higher education for the broader public good, or adding significantly to qualitative knowledge growth. At the worst this sub-sector threatens to become a net "taker" of the knowledge quotient rather than a net contributor.
In spite of these tensions one finds a firm awareness within developing countries that they cannot and indeed should not merely replicate Western higher education models. One thus observes a search for relevant and yet indigenously developed forms of higher education, in terms of delivery modes, of program content, and even of areas of research. This is especially true in the realm of knowledge conservation, particularly the preservation and enhancement of cultural and national identities and heritages. In a world in which globalization has brought the standard of English as its default language, the work of universities in preserving languages and the cultures they embody and represent is critical, and will unlikely be performed by any other set of social institutions. The consequences of possible globalization-induced homogenization, especially of the forms promoted by the mass media (and its opposite reaction of polarization of cultures), make this task of cultural and language preservation by universities vital for the promotion of a healthy and harmonious society. While repositioning themselves as effective agents in the global knowledge economy, universities must also preserve the character of their specific national higher education systems and transmit key elements of national cultural identities and traditions. Ironically, this vital role contributes to the resource tensions experienced by universities as they continue to suffer the gradual withdrawal of governmental funding for higher education.
The emergence of these new roles and responsibilities is changing how universities view themselves, seek resources, and respond to social signals to align their actions with perceived social needs. These forces and tensions are doing much to redefine historic notions of the public good responsibilities of higher education, especially public higher education. This may well be the starting conceptual framework from which universities in a globalized, knowledge-saturated world can articulate their distinctive arena, their unique niche in society. The new vectors include the role of university in providing service to society (far in advance of the conventional third place status traditionally handed universities in the pecking order of teaching, research, and service); the inherent tensions between serving as handmaiden of government vs. serving as its social critic; the responsibilities of serving as a collective and heterogeneous set of social consciences; being a predictor of and precipitator of social and scientific change, etc.
One likely novel pathway will be the development of new foci of inquiry and through them new disciplines. This has begun to happen with the study of globalization itself, which has produced both research and instructional programs with globalization at their center (and in a few isolated instances even service programs, albeit to this point successfully disguised as occupation-related leadership programs). One can argue, sensibly, that the pace of change under the impress of contemporary globalization has been so rapid and extensive, that much of what is taught in education, higher as well as basic, represents knowledge about a world that no longer exists. The tensions between history, conservation and irrelevance have been painfully sharpened by globalization's irreverent propulsions to change and its insensitivities to what is displaced by such changes. New research and instructional programs have an urgent responsibility to describe and analyze this emergent world. Put another way, the world that globalization has created produces consequences-problems and predicaments-that are not successfully accommodated within existing disciplinary boundaries. New knowledge constellations and modes of inquiry are required and are already forming.
Some of these new disciplines are likely to be formed at the edge of public policy and its many controversies. One example is global warming and climate change, problems that extend far beyond conventional disciplines and their limitations of expertise. Another example, related to the former, but with significantly different implications is sustainability, which leads to implications (and potential subfields) of social and cultural sustainability, or agricultural and rural sustainability (in what has become since the year 2000 an urbanized world). The knowledge explosion itself is likely to produce new hybrid disciplines much as they developed over the past sixty years with the creation of communications, information and computing science, and marketing. One would expect the dramatic changes in digital technologies and their virtual destruction of the practical costs of digital information storage to engender new ways of studying cultural change, consumption, and style conjoined to communication. Even as the pace of social change due to the rapid introduction of digital innovation affects society, so will higher education be pressured to study such phenomena with rigor and invent knowledge frameworks that extend both society's understanding of them as well as assisting policy responses to them. The cultural wars partially engendered and partially stirred by globalization suggest the possibility of an entirely new platform on which to erect peace studies and the serious pursuit of new inquires into the nature and resolution of human conflicts.
The development of these new foci of inquiry and emergent disciplines has in turn led to an evolution of new modalities to address them. In an ever more complex and interconnected society, universities now conduct their work in new ways. This is being increasingly realized in closer cooperation with other sectors of society, and with collaborators across national and regional boundaries. The ease and speed with which information sharing is transmitted has enabled a redefinition of communities of research and inquiry. They may still have higher education institutions as hubs, but they now routinely include the corporate sector, government agencies or sponsoring bodies, international academic colleagues, and civil society. Perhaps the growth industry of global higher education lies at the intersect between conventional crossborder education represented by the exchange of students and faculty, and the creation of new networks, partnerships, consortia and forms of association currently being invented and defined. The result is a global education community just beginning to take form and assess its strengths and possibilities. Like many other globalization phenomena, these events result in a radical mixing of our traditional categories of reference: promoting simultaneously homogenization and difference-a reach for the global amidst an intensification of the local.
Fundamentally the academic marketplace is no longer confined to national settings. More than ever, knowledge is becoming universal, escaping borders of all kinds, with unpredictable consequences. Its pursuit and advancement are based on the free exchange and circulation of ideas across scientific fields, geographic boundaries, political systems, and academic disciplines. Even as we predict a doubling of students traveling abroad within the next five years, we are witnessing the unparalleled growth of cross-border education. Both imports and exports abound in this new global market. As societies grapple with the quantum increases in demand for higher education and the inability of both their public and their private sectors to meet this demand, their governments, at first reluctantly, and then willingly, concede the access and manpower development potential of branches and programs of overseas universities. In many countries, policy frameworks governing the operation and regulation of such cross border institutions are only now being deliberated and firmed up. In such places as China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, for example, governments struggle to maintain their sense of control over the proliferation of offshore campuses, while ceding the necessity of obtaining from them the means for greater access within appropriate institutional arrangements.
It is clear to us that distance education is in its early, albeit dramatic, stage of development, both in cross-border higher education and within national boundaries. The open universities stand at the apex of this phenomenon, serving literally hundreds of thousands of students in each of the major open universities in Bangkok, Shanghai, Delhi, London, Arizona, and other capitals. The expanded access facilitated by contemporary instructional technology has made possible the enormous numbers and quality control mechanisms that would have been impossible under old distance education systems. And while initial course development and the prerequisite infrastructure for delivery makes this model more expensive in the beginning, successive iterations over time dramatically reduce unit costs. At the aggregate social level, as the numbers benefiting from distance education continue to grow and effective per student costs decline, the resulting capacity will address issues of access in the light of the massification of global higher education. The ultimate test will be on the quality issue, the demonstration of which advocates and proponents of distance education are holding steadfast to maintain, including the rather quiet but considerable expansion of corporate investments in their own versions of higher education to meet constant work force demands. The worst possible outcome would be for these massive distance education endeavors to shake out as second or third-rate enterprises effectively specializing in providing low unit cost education for those unable to obtain it elsewhere in the market. The best possible outcome is to see distance education, spurned along by its innovate technologies, leading more traditional educational institutions and their delivery modalities toward new ways of doing things, successfully challenging emergent student populations characterized by preferences for new learning solutions.
Irreducibly, the globalized world is a rapidly forming, reforming and de-forming of knowledge societies. With knowledge as the dominant currency of future growth and development, universities have little choice but to recognize their ever-changing roles as creator, transmitter, and preserver of knowledge in the context of serving the whole of society. And, in ways that we are just beginning to appreciate, they must perform these roles not just for young adults preparing for their first jobs. The technical requirements of specific professions have become so complex and are evolving so rapidly that even the best pre-service education becomes outdated a few years after it is acquired. A recent study indicates that an engineer, for example, needs fundamental retraining to update his knowledge five years after graduation. In this light, the university must see its role in not only producing new engineers, but also in servicing the current engineering workforce with programs that keep them updated, relevant, and effective. Addressing these half-lives of professions and formed knowledge quotients will become a constant currency of universities.
A knowledge society is a society of lifelong learning, and with a difference. Until recently, this phrase was code for the kinds of highly optional education provided for casual learners of advancing age. Slowly the term expanded to include a measure of retraining of individuals in the work force shifting along the cycle of restructured jobs. We now, as indicated, see it as a requirement of currency , that which is required to be professionally responsible to one's knowledge obligations. This sense of the changed nature of life-long learning will, we predict, radically further transform the demand and access calculus of higher education. What is now optional will become required.
We already see some of implications of these outcomes in the economics of what formerly was called "university extension" in many of the public and private educational institutions of the United States. What had been convenient, or service-oriented adjuncts to the "real" educational enterprise (and thus somewhat "quaint" when all was said and done) have become in many instances the new revenue centers for cash strapped universities, often serving many more students than the other branches of the institution. A further implication is the impact of all this, both for good and ill, on the professoriate, resulting in a vast expansion in the employment of part-time, contract faculty and a parallel decline in traditional tenure track positions. This shift threatens to create a true two-tier, and invidious, class system within the professoriate, but it also promises to revolutionize current patterns of retirement and the utilization of "older" minds in the overall knowledge enterprise. We are currently operating a faculty structure that owes everything to the work demands and structures of the historic industrial enterprise, after which much of contemporary higher education was modeled in the industrial revolution and its successive aftermaths. People were hired and retired in relation to a then extant, but now obsolete, combination of biological aging and the need to refresh job opportunities within higher education. To deliberately over-simplify an important point, higher education aligned with the requirements of life-long learning in a knowledge society will be based on minds and what resides within them, rather than obsolete age-related notions about the bodies that carry them about. Once again, demand will redefine capacity.
But far beyond the essential but nevertheless limited catering to market-driven demands for professional updating, universities must serve knowledge societies in a more fundamental sense. Their ultimate responsibility is to contribute meaningfully to the total development of their societies. They must reach out to and serve the shapers of this development-the political, economic, social leaders of this society, including those responsible for the education of society at levels below higher education, assuring in particular an adequate number of well qualified teachers in school systems. Higher education must assure that society continues to be equipped to address its most pressing societal problems, expand its innovation and research capacities, and foster the values needed for a productive, cohesive, harmonious, and ethical society, in the context of good governance and participatory democracy. The overall welfare of countries will depend a great deal on the extent to which universities can play their role in support of these larger goals.
Conclusion
In the midst of these remarks lie three conundrums that need to be addressed in what generally be termed the "politics and economics" of higher education in the emergent knowledge society. These strike us as issues of such prominence that they must be addressed immediately in policy processes if they have any hope of successful resolution.
The first is the transmutation of the "digital divide" problem. Initially, it referred to gap between those with computing capability and those without. Various organizations throughout the world have worked hard to bring capacity and capability to places where it was formerly lacking. Now, however, we are faced with the boundary destroying nature of digital proliferation. As indicated above, universities themselves are in danger of being hierarchically divided by their abilities to keep abreast of these developments. They represent a quantum leap change in the demands and requirements of addressing the digital divide.
The second is the issue of value within information. The changing economic dynamics of information and knowledge companies and the extraordinary growth of their products create an "informational field" of an extent and density never before experienced. In the midst of this explosive blizzard of information lies those coherence generating devices and processes we label "search." Determining the pathways and value-ways though this information blizzard toward knowledge coherence constitutes a problem of unprecedented proportions for higher education conceived of as collections of knowledge organizations. The magnitude of new resources required by such institutions to successfully navigate these transformations will be enormous. Public policy must be fully implicated in providing the capacity to deal with these changes, or public institutions at the very least will fail to breast this challenge.
Finally, we touch above on the complex issue of what knowledge to conserve in a world that is being rapidly globalized. We can similarly ask the same of the two historic functions of universities-teaching and research. What to teach is an increasingly pressing dilemma, one for which universities are particularly ill-equipped to deal, given their historically conservative decision making traditions. And, with research issues, we face the prospect of extending C.P. Snow's famous "two cultures" problem to the whole of global education. The instrumental value of science and technology, and its imperative alignment with economic development threaten to displace the study of humanities (and to some extent the social sciences) within university priorities.
These are but three policy issues that globalization has imposed upon higher education for resolution. Those responsible for higher education must grapple with these and others still to emerge; and they must grapple with these with a sense of perspective, an instinct for the future, and a vision for the role of the university in that future. If they do so, higher education, no matter what forms, modalities, and linkages it will take on, will continue to be, as it was throughout history, a beacon light and an essential dynamo of development for the societies it serves.
